Everybody who has ever wished to learn to fly, the words "Cessna Skyhawk" hold a particular significance. With its dimensions of 27 feet by 8 feet, a 36-foot wingspan, a top speed of 140 mph, and space for two persons along with their belongings, the Cessna Skyhawk is the aircraft that has taught more people to fly than any other in aviation history. Indeed, the Cessna Skyhawk is the aircraft that has sold the most units worldwide. After building his first aircraft in 1911, Clyde Cessna rose to fame in the aviation industry. Cessna produced the first turbocharged and cabin-pressurized single-engine aircraft in the 1960s, delivered its first business jet in the 1970s, built 750 gliders for the army during World War II, reached $1 billion in sales in the 1980s, and then, during one of the worst downturns in the aviation industry's history, almost went out of business over the course of the following fifteen years. General aviation aircraft sales peaked at 17,000 units annually, fell to 12,000 units in a year, and over the course of the next ten years, the industry's total sales set a record low of 928 units. Simultaneously, Cessna's annual sales of piston-engine aircraft, such as the Skyhawk, decreased from 8,000 to barely 600. Cessna, which also manufactures business jets and bigger aircraft, was forced to fire 75% of the workers at its plants that produced piston-engine aircraft before ceasing to produce them completely. But Cessna chose to resume production of its fabled Skyhawks once the economy strengthened and the US government passed the General Aviation Revitalization Act, which prohibited product liability claims on any aircraft older than eighteen years. This is your opportunity. Your first role at Cessna, after more than 20 years of employment, was to train dealers in single-engine aircraft maintenance and repair. But now that the Revitalization Act has significantly decreased the company's legal risk and earnings are once again flowing, you have been promoted to vice-president of Cessna's "new" single-engine division. It is your responsibility to start again and rebuild this area of the company. And a lot hinges on your success or failure because pilots tend to stick with the type of aircraft they learnt to fly. Twenty years from now, pilots learning on today's Cessna Skyhawks will be purchasing Cessna business jets if Cessna's single-engine division can be revived. One benefit of starting from scratch is that you may design the manufacturing facility from the ground up. Everything is up for grabs, including the location, the new employees, and the suppliers. For example, the majority of Cessna's manufacture takes place in Wichita, Kansas. However, since it exited the single-engine plane market, Wichita has mostly produced a limited number of highly tailored jets annually, in stark contrast to your company's large production of standardized single-engine aircraft. Taking into account the disparities, you find the new single-engine plane plant in Independence, Kansas, which is just 40 minutes distant by tiny plane and two hours away by automobile. You're considering adopting production teams as part of a novel approach to plane manufacture in addition to a new site. At conservative-minded Cessna, where one of your fellow managers acknowledged, "we probably got into a mode of doing things for the future based on how we'd always done things in the past," your move may seem radical to some colleagues. However, the more you consider it, the more you feel that this is the perfect choice. Assembling Skyhawks and other single-engine planes might be done by teams rather of a typical manufacturing line where each worker does a separate task. Production teams would be fully in charge of building the planes, as well as of prices and quality, which would be a stunning divergence from engineering-based standards where every worker's movements on the assembly line are examined for implications regarding time, cost, and efficiency. You anticipate a number of advantages from a team-based approach, including quicker, more effective production, happier employees, and enhanced customer satisfaction from better product quality. But a few things bother you. Teams and teamwork have many benefits, but they may also have serious drawbacks. The cost of implementing them is high. They need a lot of instruction. Furthermore, they are only functional around one-third of the time. Therefore, even though they said they wouldn't, you can't deny that it would be extremely dangerous for Cessna to use teams. However, you can't help but believe that working in teams may be beneficial and that there might be approaches to reduce the likelihood of failure. For instance, you get to start with a completely new crew because the company will be in Independence, Kansas, a new location.

 Whom should you recruit in order to foster teamwork? 

What qualifications and experience are necessary for them to be successful in a team setting?

 How much power and accountability should you offer teams if you decide to go ahead and use them? 

Should their role be restricted to advising management alone, or should you give them complete control over productivity, quality, and costs? 

And last, other from the assembly line, are there any other settings in which teams may be used? 

Every team is unique. Perhaps there are other locations where teams might help make Cessna's "new" single-engine plane manufacturing facility a success? 

What would you do if you were in control of Cessna's "new" single-engine factory?

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Whom should you recruit in order to foster teamwork To foster teamworkyou should recruit people who are Collaborative and teamoriented They should be able to work effectively with others towards commo... View the full answer